Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

The Saudi Phase of the Iran War Signals More Chaos to Come

The conflict that Donald Trump has repeatedly proclaimed an unequivocal American victory keeps spiraling out of control.

Flames rise above a state-owned Aramco oil facility attacked under unclear circumstances outside Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, earlier this month.

The Houthis, an Iranian ally vying for control of war-torn Yemen, hit the headquarters of the Saudi state oil company Aramco in Dharan on Tuesday night. That attack came just days after they fired ballistic missiles into the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, killing 12 and further puncturing the regime’s carefully cultivated image of competence amid a sea of instability. These market-rattling attacks unfolded just weeks after an Iraq-based militia struck and damaged a critical east-west Saudi oil pipeline.

This sudden demonstration of Saudi Arabia’s vulnerability is the latest bout of regional fallout from President Donald Trump’s impulsive and failed war against Iran. The conflict hasn’t accomplished any of Trump’s war aims—to the extent that he’s able to articulate them—but it is clearly destabilizing the entire Persian Gulf region with consequences that will extend far beyond the time horizon of the upcoming midterm elections or even this disastrous presidency. And if Trump can’t bring himself to somehow come to terms with an emboldened Tehran, it’s far from clear that the chaos now enveloping the Gulf can be stopped at its frontiers.

Riyadh is under siege from all directions in what amounts to a dizzying reversal of fortune. Just a year ago, Saudi Arabia was riding high, having greased enough palms inside the Trump family syndicate to ensure that the Kingdom wouldn’t be the target of confiscatory tariffs or some other sudden spasm of incoherent, late-night rage from the president himself.

Meanwhile, the Kingdom’s longtime rivals in Tehran were on their heels, having allowed the joint Israeli-American 12-Day War in the summer of 2025 to degrade Iran’s nuclear program and military readiness without any meaningful retaliation. Riyadh also had significant leverage to deploy, given that Trump was desperate for the Saudis to abandon the Palestinian cause, join the Abraham Accords, and come to a diplomatic accord with Israel.

Today the Saudis’ decades-long security and development strategy is in deep crisis, thanks to an American war that Riyadh very much egged on. There’s never been any reason to support America’s alliance with the corrupt, despotic Saudi regime. But the sudden unraveling of the Saudi economy would have knock-on effects that would be unpleasant for everyone. And it’s now clear that the shortage of critical munitions plaguing the US military extends to regional allies who seem to be close to defenseless against missile and drone strikes.

The fact that the........

© The Nation